“Most Wanted” Fugitive Found By Police on Facebook

By Barbara E. Hernandez •Published November 16, 2014•Updated on November 18, 2014 at 4:36 pm

Los Angeles Police Department

Eduardo Rodriguez was an alleged gang leader charged with four counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder when police believe he fled to Mexico in 2003 from his Atwater Village, Calif. address.

After 11 years, Glendale police re-opened the cold case. An officer on desk duty decided to start looking up names of Rodriguez's friends into his computer which led him to a Facebook page of a Riverside, Calif. woman, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The investigator found a person that looked a lot like Rodriguez, which cracked the cold case and later ended in Rodriguez's arrest in Riverside.

The problem was that an extensive manhunt, a piece on "America's Most Wanted," and multiple bulletins didn't solve the case -- but an officer doing research on Facebook did.

The investigation still took several months with police staking out the address in Riverside. They arrested him Thursday as he was going to work. Rodriguez, who had been using a false name, didn't resist arrest. He's being held without bail.

While there's no evidence that Rodriguez had a Facebook account himself, apparently his friends and acquaintances did which led to a gradual unraveling of his identity and whereabouts. We know that law enforcement peruses social networks, and this instance shows how it can bring down.